User blog:Capi3101/WCRPG Update for October 26, 2015
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. I had a pretty busy week this past week; I wish I could say that I spent the majority of my time working on Elegy but looking back through my log, that's just not the case. Most of my work this past week was in relation to my nascent WCCCG VASSAL mod, which I have to report this morning has hit a minor snag - namely, it's reached Beta status over the weekend (yes, I did just start the thing a little over a week ago) but due to its size I still don't have it up where it's available to the general public. The spot where it goes is almost all ready to go, though, and as soon as I can get clearance from somebody willing to host a 200 MB file, all will be cool and froody. Development, as I had hoped, has gone by very fast, and I'm pleased to say that the mod has all the features in it that I wanted to have added to it. It still needs a proper shakedown, of course, but that'll come with time. I have identified a small number of bugs to squash with it (namely I want to move Modifier cards down on the game piece layers and I think I need to fix how the Rules are presented), so the delay will give me some time to take care of those. That's not to say that work was focused entirely on the WCCCG mod this past week - far from it, actually. After adding terms from the previous week's translations on Monday, I turned my attention to the Aces craft, starting with the Andorran Raven. As I predicted, the shipbuilding bug hit me and wound up knocking out it, the Kilrathi Kurtahk fighter and the Andorran Zodiac-class before the close of business on Monday; all of the Aces craft are done at this point. Both the Kurtahk and the Zodiac were as straight-forward as they come; the Zodiac is the first craft I built without adding the expanded ECCM module rules to the craft's notes, owing to the work done on the Late Entries page the previous week. The Raven gave me a little bit of trouble; I wound up adding an extra SWACS module to the design as well as a Tachyon Sonar system (i.e. cloak-detection capability) to make up for some of its very generic abilities, and I added a very strong ECM module to it - she's a hard craft to hit no matter how you slice it. I would call her unbalanced, personally, but as the idea was to be as true to the original as possible, and I think I've managed to do that. Elegy also saw a fair amount of work during the week. In Scene Five of Chapter 2.0, I completed a total of nineteen blocks of translation this past week - and for those who've been keeping track, yes, that does mean that Scene Five's translation is finished at this point. Work will commence on the translation of Scene Six - the final scene in Chapter 2.0 - later this morning. Forty-two blocks of text stand between me and having 2.0 completely finished at this point; I anticipate the work will take me to the end of November to complete (possibly longer - my wife is going to have a baby, our third son, at some point during the month of November). A total of twenty new terms were generated for the Kilrathi lexicon this past week with fifteen terms re-purposed, corresponding to 64 reverse terms. I did have some pretty interesting translation work to do on Wednesday, when I had to translate a distance of "one foot" into Kilrathi - I wound up getting a quick lesson on how you convert decimals from base 10 to other base numbers (base 8 in this case, naturally). The phrase ultimately translated as zarmaki h'pdeok, or "seven-and-two-eights one-sixty-fourth-maks" (27 zarmaks, a zarmak being one-sixty-fourth of a mak, using the standard 1.2 mak per meter conversion, rounding to two decimal places). I wound up taking most of the translation time during my morning break that day just to make that translation. I suppose Maki kna in h'pdeok ("zero-point-seven-and-two-eights maks") would also have been an acceptable translation, but I figure using the smaller unit of distance makes for an easier to read (assuming anybody actually uses the Kilrathi during game play anyway). Some work also took place in Chapter 2.1 during the week, including work on starting notes for the characters of Knav'qith, Le'a'he and Nagkilin, and some work on the dialogue of the mission epilogue. Since all the side projects are effectively wrapped up at this point, my Plan is to stick to Elegy as much as possible. Add this week's terms to the lexicon, do translation work in Scene Six of 2.0 and continue building 2.1. I don't have enough of the Prologue and Epilogue dialogue of Chapter 2.1 to begin translation work there, but by the same token I don't anticipate finishing up Scene Six this week, either. There are seventeen sizable blocks of text in the chapter, with two of them particularly large - though none of them approach the length of Scene Five's "mega-block" that I translated a few weeks ago. I do feel the need to pick up the pace in 2.1, so I may switch my priorities from working two breaks on translation work to working two breaks on 2.1. I've also been sitting on the notion of adding "plot points" to the campaign for a couple of weeks now, something which I'll need to make a decision on sooner or later. I may take some time to work on that this week. Well, that's all I've got for this week. The next scheduled update will be between 11-14Z on November 2nd. Y'all have a pleasant week. Category:Blog posts